Experiments

Peter Meng has a history of tackling the impossible. He helped federal employees at 18,000 offices learn an arcane computer loan program. His secret? He used CD-ROMs featuring Elvis impersonators to teach the classes. His efforts won kudos for $25 million in "cost avoidance," the government jargon for saving taxpayer dollars.

Now Meng is tackling another seemingly impossible task: Helping newspapers win back classified advertising from online, which has cost traditional news organizations billions in lost revenues.

The fourth class of Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Fellows will pursue innovation and entrepreneurship in start-up journalism, new online revenue opportunities, research to improve the design and delivery of news, and networking to more quickly and efficiently share innovation in journalism.

"While our colleagues on the business side deserve credit for pushing newsrooms to become more nimble in recent years, they have also consistently failed to imagine and then incubate a Craigslist, a Groupon, a Monster. com, let alone a Google or a Facebook. Nor are they any closer today than they were last year in fixing the broken business model of quality journalism. ... Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. ... It is time we figured out how to make it [journalism] easier, more engaging and useful. -- Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor, read more in The Washington Post

Did your workweek get away from you? Anxious or afraid you missed something you should know? RJI shares links to hot-topic web posts of interest to those immersed in journalism innovation and transition.

Around the nation, entrepreneurs are testing methods for delivering news that matters to small communities -- without the legacy costs of newsprint, presses and delivery. In the small New England college town of Williamstown (pop. 7,500) a non-profit organization begun in the 1980s has revived and turned to testing the waters of a new approach. RJI consulting fellow Bill Densmore is among those helping.

Did your workweek get away from you? Anxious or afraid you missed something you should know? RJI shares links to hot-topic web posts of interest to those immersed in journalism innovation and transition.

Since then, we’ve hit nearly 150 data sets and are continuing to add features (data file sharing and Sunshine letter generator) and otherwise tweak the site.

I’ve learned some great lessons this fellowship year by tapping into the wisdom of my fellow RJI fellows and Columbia developer Jamie Stephens, and from reading “Getting Real,” a book from 37signals, a web software company.

A mobile game that gives players incentives to track, publish and share news has taken the Grand Prize in RJI’s fourth annual Student Developer Competition. Five teams of journalism, business and computer science students at the University of Missouri developed mobile apps for the Innovation Division of Hearst, Inc. with support from technology partners Adobe, Google and Sprint.

Students from the Missouri School of Journalism and the College of Engineering have been working on some amazing innovations this semester. Take a look at what they've accomplished by attending our second annual RJI Student Innovator Showcase tomorrow (Thursday) from 9 am - noon in the Fred W. Smith Forum at RJI. We'll feature the winners of the RJI-Hearst Student Competition, MOJO Ad's campaign for Hallmark, teams from the iOS application development class and much more.

Watch a live broadcast of KBIA’s "Intersection" program, tackling the topic of "The Future of Public Media."

With Juan Williams-gate, the controversial resignation of NPR’s president, and legislators threatening to pull funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the heat is on for public media. The question is: Can public media survive and thrive? We will tackle the question head on, with help from our panelists and input from the live audience.

In the aftermath of the $315 million sale of the Huffington Post to AOL there has been a kerfuffle from the unpaid bloggers who helped create value for the blogging network.

The Newspaper Guild has called for a strike, asking unpaid writers to hold their content. This week Jonathan Tasini has filed a lawsuit for $105 million on behalf of the 9,000 unpaid bloggers that have contributed content to the site.

"The Advisory Council of the Institute for Advertising Ethics encourages the endorsement and promotion of the Institute's Principles and Practices for Advertising Ethics by Marketers, Advertising Agencies, Media Companies, and academic, professional and business associations. The procedure, as stated in the accompanying Resolution, dated April 14, 2011, is very straight forward and simply requires notification to the Executive Director, Wally Snyder at wsnyder@aaf.org, that the company or organization is endorsing the principles utilizing the name of the Institute for Advertising Ethics. All parties so notifying the Executive Director will be posted on the Institute's Websites. The Institute also will review recommendations to add additional Commentaries to the Principles and will announce approval through publication on the Instiute's Websites, www.aaf.org ; and www.rjionline.org."